80-year-old Remembers Best Of Times

November 15, 1985|By Don Wilson of The Sentinel Staff

Of the 6,500 hunters who descend on the Ocala National Forest for Saturday's opening of the 1985-86 hunting season, Clarence Watkins probably will be the only one who won't be disappointed if he fails to shoot a deer.

Watkins, 80, certainly will pull the set trigger on his Steyr-Mannlicher .243-caliber rifle if he gets a clear shot. And just as certainly he'll down a deer with the shot.

Watkins, a retired Orlando engineer, has killed countless deer in more than 60 years of hunting in the forest, and over the years he has honed his hunting instincts.

But to Watkins, the pleasure of opening day really involves being out in his beloved forest and listening to a pack of well-trained dogs pursue their quarry.

Watkins has a love of the outdoors that extends beyond the kill, embracing the sights, smells and sounds of the forest's creatures.

''I am going up there to be with some people that I never see except during hunting season and because I enjoy being in the woods,'' Watkins said. ''I know good and well that they are going to jump some deer, and I am going to hear somebody's dogs run. I do not expect to get a shot at a deer, but I will enjoy it just as much as can be.''

And while he waits and listens for the changing pitch of the bark that signals the dogs' discovery of a deer, Watkins undoubtedly will be thinking of earlier hunts he has enjoyed on the same land.

He has tramped the forest many times since his first hunt in 1915.

Some of those outings produced such vivid remembrances that his eyes gleam when he recounts them.

Such as the time he was hunting quail and unexpectedly stood almost nose- to-nose with a large buck.

Although he reloaded his shotgun with buckshot, Watkins never fired at the animal, savoring the scene instead.

''There stood the deer, looking at the dog, and the dog was looking back at me like 'Why in the devil don't you come up here and shoot these birds','' Watkins said. ''I could have shot that deer easy -- he wasn't 35 feet away. . . . I was just sitting there, enjoying the thing. I wouldn't have taken a thousand dollars for that.''

The sight of the hunting dogs jumping from their cages on the backs of pickups may trigger the memory of the day that Watkins' prized pointer, Pat, performed an unbelievable feat.

Watkins had just downed two quail, and the dog was returning dutifully, the two birds held gently between its jaws, when it stopped suddenly.

With the birds in its mouth, the dog locked on another point, locating a third bird that had kept hidden in the scrub.

On Saturday, the dense stands of pine trees will force Watkins and the other hunters to stick to logging roads and small clear-cut areas to find deer. Chances are, when the dogs jump a deer, they will be out of sight, and Watkins will have to take his pleasure from the sounds of the chase.

But he remembers a time, back before the federal government bought the land and planted huge tracts of pine to make lumbering profitable, when the hunt was a more visual joy.

''You could see for miles. Once in a while you'd see trees . . . and the oaks weren't much more than waist- and shoulder-high,'' Watkins said.

''People would go in there and burn off sections every three years to kill off the scrub oak, then they'd have a heavy acorn crop, and the deer would come in to feed. When they would burn that off regularly, underneath the brush the sand would be just as white as could be, and you could track a deer.

''A lot of people hunted in pairs. One would walk along and follow the track of the deer, the other would be ready to shoot when the deer jumped up. Now you can't track deer like that because there is too much underbrush.''

In those days, before logging roads honeycombed the forest, there were only a handful of rutted dirt roads, and the Model T Fords weren't as agile as modern four-wheel-drive rigs, so hunter access was limited.

Watkins and his fellow hunters, however, knew by heart the trails the deer favored and the areas where they could be found.

One especially productive zone near Hog Valley was a half-mile by 9-mile stretch of relatively open land.

''I could go in there almost anywhere at any time and jump deer,'' Watkins said. ''It was ideal lying ground; it was ideal feeding ground because of that young browse on the scrub oak that they liked very much. But that has all been destroyed -- plowed up and planted in pines.''

Over the years, as he watched the practices of the pulpwood industry change the forest's face, Watkins also has seen hunting pressure increase.

Private landowners throughout the state have closed their lands to hunting, forcing more and more people into the national forest.

It was a vastly different scene from the day years before when his father mildly criticized Watkins for suggesting they fence off some of the 200,000 acres the family owned in Putnam, Clay and Bradford counties.